Viddy Brings ‘Instagram for Video’ to Android

Viddy, previously only available on Apple's iPhone, is now available on phones running Google's Android operating system. Photo by: Alex Washburn/Wired

Viddy, the popular social video app that wants to be “Instagram for video,” is finally available on Android. Its arrival this morning in the Google Play storefront comes about a year and a half after it hit iOS, and it couldn’t come at a better time.

Although the iOS version claimed the “most downloaded” spot at the App Store earlier this year and the company brought in $30 million in investments from the likes of Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, singer Shakira and Roc Nation, Viddy has seen its daily unique visitors decline. Still, the number of registered users has grown from 10 million in April to 40 million registered users as of this month, suggesting there is a whole lot of growth potential.

“We don’t look at it like the stock market,” co-founder and CEO Brett O’Brien said of Viddy’s user base. “We don’t look at the macro trends. We look at the fact that almost every smartphone nowadays has an HD camera on it. And people are getting more and more used to sharing video, socially. We’re just heads down, continuing to innovate and iterate with the product, expand across more platforms and expand internationally. I look at the category and it’s still one of the fastest-growing categories on the internet.”

O’Brien said he believes that, over the next few months, Android could deliver double the 40 million registered iOS users the company currently has. But making Viddy the next Instagram or even the next Twitter can’t be done on iOS alone. After all, about 500 million Android devices have been activated over the last five years. Another 1.3 million are activated each day.

“Being on Android is hugely important for us,” O’Brien told Wired. “It’s a major opportunity for us — it’s the other half of the smartphone world, really. And, if you look at our competition, there’s really nothing like this on Android. There are a bunch of video apps and social apps on iOS, but nothing like Viddy on Android.”

Indeed, a look through Google Play shows that no social video apps quite match the polish that Viddy’s Android iteration delivers. Viddy on Android is just as good as it is on iOS. It looks and works great. Helping Viddy’s case, is the fact its biggest rival, AutoDesk’s Socialcam, last updated its Android app Aug. 15.

While Socialcam allows for unlimited video uploads and the ability to share videos of any length, Viddy’s app is stocked full of filters that add a vintage and filmic look to videos that are confined to 15-second clips. Now, Viddy will find out whether or not Android users will show up and take to Viddy.

“We’ve spent the last six months building our Android app and we’re really proud of it,” O’Brien said. “We wanted to do it right, and doing it right required a lot of time to pull off the same special effects, to maintain our UI, our user experience.”

Part of the reason it took Viddy so long to land on Android was a push to make it work with consistency across across 735 different Android smartphones and tablets, he said, adding that “Android has a lot of technical challenges because of all the different form factors and hardware variation, but it we think we’ve done right.”

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